Saturday, April 9, 2011

GREEN VIEW:THE SHADOW ON CLIMATE GATE

Green view: The shadow of climate gateIt hit just over a year ago, as ambassadors, ministers and heads of statewere preparing to descend on Copenhagen for a climate summit years inthe making. The blogosphere, American cable news and, in time, the restof the media lit up with discussions of a swathe of e-mails from themoderately obscure Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of EastAnglia. A person or persons still unknown had posted this e-mail archive,as well as other computer files from CRU, on to a server in Russia, andsent messages to various climate sceptic blogs designed to tip them off tothe treasures therein.A year on, the shadow of climategate, as it was unhelpfully but inevitablynamed, remains palpable. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger clearly had itin mind when he recently said “Last year we had a tremendous setbackbecause some of the science and some of the numbers were manipulatedand that is very damaging because it gives the other side a way in.” This isa climategate narrative that seems quite popular among many peoplewho, like Schwarzenegger, remain committed to the need for actionagainst global warming—and very popular among people who take theopposite view: that a significant chunk of science had been franklyfraudulent, and that the discovery of this fraud had had a very bad impacton the fight against global warming. Its popularity, though, does not makethis story right. Climategate was not about the manipulation of numbers:and the setback for the green cause Mr Schwarzenegger espouses was notclimategate, but Copenhagen.The climategate e-mails led to three inquiries in the United Kingdom. All ofthem were flawed in different ways. None of them, though, gave credenceto the idea that “science and numbers were manipulated”. In a report intothose inquiries for Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, anorganisation opposed to action on climate change and critical of the qualityof the science behind that case, Andrew Montford, a blogger with the samepredispositions as the Foundation, sums up the principal climategateallegations in a way that shows them to be much more about process thanabout manipulated findings. He cites an exclusion of sceptical views fromthe literature; a misrepresentation of primary research, and itsuncertainties, in some secondary presentations; a lack of openness torequests for information and a willingness to contravene Britain’s freedomof information act; a discordance between what the scientists said inprivate and what they said in public. Fraud in basic science and primarydata of the sort Schwarzenegger spoke of, and which is commonly said tohave been revealed, does not make the list.Alleged flaws—in one case, an expressly alleged fraud—in the scientificwork of the CRU researchers and some of those they corresponded withwere common currency among critical bloggers well before the emailswere leaked. Questions about the validity of reconstructions of mediaevalclimate based on treerings, about why some treerings are taken to begood records of temperature at some points in history but not in therecent past, about cherry-picking of data, about the traceability orotherwise of Chinese weather station data and so on had all been airedlong before. The climategate e-mails offered little if any new informationthat might move these debates on in either direction.What they offered was colour—catchphrases like “hide the decline”—andcontext. There was clear evidence of circled wagons, shared distaste forthe scientist’s critics, and unwillingness to conform to the quite highstandards of opennness that the freedom of information act—and theideals of their calling—seek to impose on scientists. A lot—lost, indeed—ofscience would look just the same if its privacy were similarly breached(and many other areas of human endeavour would look as bad or worse);but to accept that this is the way of world does little to minimise thedamage. People do not want to believe that scientific knowledge of highand lasting value is messy and human in the making; scientific culturedoes its best to insulate then from that belief. The middle of a media stormis not the place to wheel out sociologists and historians who might educatethem on the subject.So there was a pervasive impression of disrepute. And there was evidenceof the sort of secrecy that often has something to hide. These factorscame to colour everything else—and thus to lead to a world where it iswidely thought there was lots of fraud and manipulation going on. If therehad been straightforward fraud things might, in fact, have been simpler.Climategate did not materially effect the outcome of Copenhagen. Thereasons that the countries which met there could not agree had everythingto do with diplomacy, politics and economics. They had absolutely nothingto do with what people in the room thought about the probity of aparticular subset of climate science.What climategate changed was the response that came after. For thosedisappointed by the results, climategate provided a focus for displacedrecrimination—something to blame. Doubt about climate change hasregularly been helped along by concerted campaigns, and the climategatelooked like more of the same. After all, no fraud had been found—but look!The media was all over it! And Copenhagen failed! Conspiracy!In general people don’t like to be associated with losers, and inCopenhagen the case for strong climate action spectacularly failed to getits preferred result. In this light, an increasing post-climategate tolerancefor doubts about warming among the media and some politicians can beread, with just a little cynicism, as people making tactical use ofclimategate to distance themselves from an agenda they had once thoughtpopular but which now looked increasingly lifeless.And what of those who were happy Copenhagen had failed? For them,climategate was a more comforting reason for that failure than the realones. Copenhagen did not fail because governments didn’t want action onthe climate, or even because no one is willing to take any action. It failedbecause they all wanted other countries to take more and different actionsthan the other countries would agree to. For people who don’t want thereever to be action, though, it is obviously happier to think that the case hadbeen undermined by some dodgy emails than to recognise than that it stillstood—and indeed still stands—but had simply failed to compel action.This reaction can be seen in its strongest form in American politics. For theRepublican party, and for those voting for it, it is no longer necessary toargue about climate change. It has become acceptable to simply ignore it,professing some mixture of doubt, bafflement and apathy. Don’t we allknow that the climate thing is over?But though this looks like a reaction to climategate, and to flaws in theproducts and processes of the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange, those factors are, again, the sizzle not the steak. At its heart thistoo is a response to Copenhagen, and the subsequent lack of momentumon climate action, and the administration’s inability to do anything aboutit. The case for action currently feels so weak that it can be held off with aflat palm of refusal-to-engage. Perceptions of climategate doubtless makethat stance easier to hold. But they aren’t its underlying cause.